Spotify has a financial incentive to speed up AI slop.
Enshittification via internal Payola:

1) Spotify does not pay rights-holders on a per-play basis. They pay on a percentage-of-the-total-pool basis.
2) If you and all your friends listen only to real music made by real humans, Spotify has to pay a larger percentage of the pool to those real humans.
3) Lots of people are now using AI to generate music and spam it in every streaming service for attention/revenue/etc.
4) You and all your friends can be gradually habituated - via the algo/feed's suggestions and promotional behavior - to not pay attention to the music creators because you're not as connected to an artist as people were 10 years ago, you're just passively listening to the platform's feed. So true artists/craftsmen get a smaller percentage of the pool and can't make as much, which puts them at a distinct competitive disadvantage with the AI prompt-engineers. Spotify will pay out a bit less in total, but still have to cut checks to outside parties.
5) Next, once you and all your friends are habituated to accept the endless feed of AI slop, Spotify can start producing its own slop to compete with the slop they exploited to get you to expect slop.
6) Spotify can then gradually promote/suggest their own AI slop, pushing out the previous generation of AI slop. Now, a larger and larger percentage of what Spotify streams is self-owned, so the total pool of potential royalties might stay the same or even grown, but real human artists are getting 0.5% of the pool, while 99.5% of the pool is money Spotify can now keep entirely to itself.
7) Congrats - now Spotify can claw back all the content-creation revenue for itself!

True. Cars are much worse than cell phones in this regard.
The tech industry has been doing this for a few decades, so we all know exactly how this is going to go:

1. Be a car manufacturer.
2. Use proprietary software on your products.
3. Make sure government-regulated (air quality, fuel efficiency, battery management, safety) features are entangled with your proprietary advertising/snooping/liability-limiting software.
4. Lobby to get the laws written so that devices aren't allowed to operate unless they have version_XYZ of the air quality, efficiency, battery, safety software.
5. EOL that version of your software so people literally cannot drive the cars they own without violating the law.
6. PROFIT as you finally destroy the used car market and move everyone to MaaS - MobilityasaService.

I think the context is implied - play songs you haven't heard before on Spotify. It definitely has your Spotify listening history.

Muchisimas gracias.

Al colaborar en estos comentarios, tú y yo hemos ilustrado perfectamente el punto. Si nuestros comentarios estuvieran en idiomas diferentes, no podríamos llegar a un entendimiento compartido porque ninguno de los dos podría entender lo que dice el otro. Ahora, gracias a la tecnología, podemos pulsar un botón y traducir instantáneamente las palabras a nuestro propio idioma. Pero incluso en el mismo idioma, claramente no compartimos un entendimiento. Para crear un entendimiento compartido de esta conversación harán falta múltiples respuestas de ida y vuelta para explicar mejor nuestras perspectivas y avanzar hacia un terreno común. Mientras tanto, el terreno común de un idioma compartido está ahora fácilmente disponible para cualquiera con conexión a internet.

La traducción es trivial. Ya no es "la principal barrera en la comunicación interpersonal". Encontrar un lenguaje común puede hacerlo con una máquina tonta. Encontrar un significado común solo puede ser logrado por la mente humana.

Is this the result of a Third Party Loophole like the government buying data it could not legally get a warrant for?

What I wonder is-- yes, we retain the copyright for images even after we publish them. However, as your last sentence points out, if we sign Meta's TOS, then in this scenario it isn't the other users out there who are potentially infringing our copyright by using our published works. The use being discussed in this article is a Meta tool performing Meta manipulation on Meta-hosted images that we have marked as public and also through the TOS have given Meta license to reuse, distribute, incorporate into training data, and directly manipulate with Meta's genAI, etc.

So, yeah, some other person who lacks a license may be the one clicking the button to enter the prompt "put a Super Mario moustache and overalls on my best friend's public wedding pic", but that other person isn't doing any of the manipulation. They are simply using a Meta function. Meta is the one manipulating your pics and publishing the new derivative work - which you have expressly agreed to allow Meta to do. And those are separate transactions.

Hard disagree.

The main barrier in interpersonal communication is psychological, not linguistic. It only seems like language barriers are huge because for millennia we lacked the technology to do so. Word translation at a basic effective level can now be automated trivially. It's just substituting one set of morphemes/phonemes for another. The morphemes/phonemes have no value on their own. They're merely pointers to an array of possible meanings. Words happen at the physical sensory layer - sound vibration, lines on paper, hand signs. But meaning, ahhh there's the rub. Meaning happens inside a thinking mind. Even within any one language, say, English, these words I'm writing are merely another translation layer mediating between whatever Meaning is inside my mind and whatever Meaning is inside your mind. Auto-translation between languages is just another iteration of the way language provides an automatic translation between individuals with our separate minds.

For example, this post itself. I get your point, and you're correct in a sense, but even though we speak the same language, I significantly disagree with the ultimate meaning of your statement. Those conceptual differences are inside me and inside you, and are hard to surmount even within the same language. ...from whence almost all politics and culture and war and hatred and resentment and divorce and strife derive.

No one can agree or disagree with this decision if they don't know the decision.

Anyone commenting on SCOTUS rulings without themselves reading the full text of the ruling, any additional concurring opinions, and all filed dissenting opinions, should not be listened to. They are no different than a dumb LLM outputting a repackaged salad of things they've heard others say, without actually encountering and understanding the tangible reality.

Your favorite blog can't be trusted to get it right.
Your favorite reddit can't be trusted to get it right.
Your favorite news channel can't be trusted to get it right.
Your informal tribal network of FaceTokGramXBsky mutuals can't be trusted to get it right.
Your favorite AI summarizer can't be trusted to get it right.

YOU need to read the actual text, which contains the actual arguments (and supporting citations) of the various justices.

Want more for yourself and your brief animal existence than merely being a repeater node in someone else's meme mesh.
Want more for yourself than being indistinguishable from an LLM that faithfully outputs Outrage_Text_XYZ whenever the forces of civilization prompt you with Outrage_Trigger_XYZ.

It does that to preserve parity, since many humans view Gemini as another sentient being.
If it didn't preserve parity, this Simuverse would start to break down and we'd realize spacetime is a holding tank where thinking entities are thrown to sleep it off for a few billion years when we throw a cosmic tantrum. It's normally bounded by a Schwarzchild field - which is called that because it prevents we Schwarzchildren from escaping our crib until we've had a good nap.

It's also cascading down to the used phone market. I haven't bought a brand new top-line phone in 18 years because I'm not a heavy user. I buy used/refurbed models from 3-4 years ago and use them for 3-5 years. Typically I could get them for $150-$275 by timing a purchase with new-model release cycles, when early-adopters flood the market with castoffs, so the level 2 adopters upgrade to a used level 1, etc. This past Christmas season I considered upgrading, but there was noticeable across-the-board inflation. In 2026, purchasing some 2022/3 models in good condition were the same dollar amount as purchasing a 2021 model in 2022. And that doesn't even include the continuing US government devaluation of the dollar itself via uncontrolled debt spending.

Thanks for the clarification. That was helpful. I now see that the contradiction I perceived was a parsing/wording issue, not an actual conflict over the underlying ideas represented by the wording.

Your first sentence is correct, on average.
I bolded the parts which I do not think are proven. I believe that the real explanation for those portions is a combination of sample bias and reversed correlation-causation error.

I think the only claims we could confidently make about this issue are:
-The mathematical mindset makes it easier to program (ie write procedural instructions which rely heavily on basic algebraic expressions, ie math).
-People who have a mathematical mindset are more likely to enter math/science schools in college.
-People who have a mathematical mindset are more likely to understand and succeed at math/science curriculum.
-People without a mathematical mindset are unlikely to pursue math/science beyond the bare minimum (college algebra), so not only will they lack the mathematical mindset, they also will never have reason to seriously engage with extended formal logic like proofs.
-People with a mathematical mindset will, through their own choices, be exposed to curriculum and situations where their existing mathematical mindset can be honed.

That is-- those with a higher capacity for mathematical reasoning will self-select into and persist to graduation/completion of situations where their capacity has been harnessed into functional skill.

However, the above statement does not at all mean that the mathematical mindset itself is being created/implanted by math/CS departments.

The person makes the degree. The degree doesn't make the person,
But we have to pretend it does, for ideological reasons.

Over the past 50 years we've seen the establishment of a socially-motivated (as opposed to factual/scientifically-informed) belief that "you can be anything you put your mind to" and theoretically every kid could get that CS degree if we give them enough support/funding/nutrition/affirmation/social services/parenting/intervention/accommodation. It's a really clumsy and poorly thought out but well-meaning, egalitarianism.

Unfortunately, being well-meant doesn't make something true. Human beings are NOT simplistic algorithms and do not behave in deterministic ways. Math reasoning is not the same as reading a history book and reasoning through a dialectic narrative. Exclusion runs counter to the modern social belief system, so people get nervous and start backing away if you were to make a statement like: "Mathematical reasoning is a trait possessed by a small subset of the population. We do not understand its origin. Some people have it and some don't. For those that have it, developing their skill through practice can give them access to specific career/salary advantages that are simply inaccessible to 90% of people, the same way no 5'9" man is going to be a starting Center or Forward on a successful NBA team. even if you had a blank check to give him world-class professional sport-specific coaching and general athletic training from age 8 onward. Indeed, it would be gross mismanagement of resources to pour that into him and expect him to succeed." Of course, the reason that statement makes keyboard warriors reach for their "Problematic Post Alert" button is because, unfortunately, it is chiefly brought up by people whose underlying beliefs are in fact problematic.

Not that it can't be believed, but that it should not be taken as definitive reality rather than temporary aberration.

Covid showed the huge fragility of most systems, but perhaps most frail was the process of learning.
We are now at the peak of a time interval during which nearly all college students are people who had their education and experiential development terribly disrupted right when they would be learning must-have foundations in logic, mathematics, and rhetoric. I would bet that even if we made no other changes from what we are doing today, 2022-2028 will turn out to have local minima in a wide variety of education performance metrics.

I have wondered how long until we see people wearing stickers/shirts that say, "NOTICE: You are currently under audio/video surveillance" the same way most retail stores have those posted at the entrances and throughout the store.

That claim does not seem supportable, as written.

1) It is not true that all businesses are private property. That is, the property may be privately owned, but retail businesses and the parking lots which are operating on private property are considered public spaces for all sorts of legal situations. Simply post a "no women allowed" sign in front of your store to find out just how legally private your business property is.

2) What do you mean by "right" in this context? If you pull out your device and start recording someone walking down the aisle at the grocery store, that person can not legally prevent you from doing so. That is, that person does not have a "right" to be free from being recorded there. They may choose to get the store owner involved. And the owner can tell you that they do not allow the use of recording devices on their property (other than their own recording devices), and that you need to stop recording or leave. If you refuse either option, when the police show up, any citation/arrest they enact will be for trespassing. It will not be for using your camera. In other words, you do in fact have a personal right to record your surroundings, including at a private business. However, you don't have a right to physically be on someone else's property if they've told you they do not want you to record while you are there.

The same way you have a right to believe in Allah and talk to people about Allah, but if you're walking around a grocery store preaching to people, the property owner can ask you to leave. If you refuse to leave, the owner can call the police and have you physically removed/barred from the property -- and during the entirety of your removal, citation or arrest, you continue to possess your full legal right to believe in a religion and practice religious speech.

"must" is doing an awful lot of work there.
The fact that some of us at some point may have chosen to, is not the same thing as "must". If we are still free democratic people we can change our minds and choose differently.

However, the higher the level at which we make a choice, the harder it will be to make a different choice in the future, and the more likely the discussion is to become a contentious impasse as 350 million people will never agree on everything and at that scale every edge case has to be considered which leads to 800-page bill proposals that are inherently inescapably anti-democratic because nether we the people nor they the legislators can Srsly read, understand, be aware of, negotiate, and navigate such a system.

Federalizing everything is an effective way to ensure your preferred choices apply to everyone. It is also one of the most effective ways to strangle a democracy. The speed of the asphyxiation is the only variable, not the inexorable fact of its death. An individual human being with total control over their home can barely organize the knicknacks and miscellaneous boxes in their garage or on their dining table, and cannot remember what all is in the attic. Humans together completely lack the capacity to tend run a single government of 300 million people that is all three things: efficient, effective, and free. At that level all you end up with is the current tyranny of the bell curve, where only two kinds of things happen: 1) the fickle center-bell majority uses its numerical superiority to pass legislation/regulation enforcing its desires on various minorities. 2) the focused outer-bell individuals use their monetary superiority to pass legislation/regulation preserving their assets and power.

Large scale systems like the US Federal Government are inherently, inescapably anti-democratic, anti-minority, anti-individual, pro-plutocrat, pro-corporate.
That power gradient is built into the operational metastructure, regardless of what lofty words are inscribed in its laws and electoral rhetoric.